Tea Guys

Does anyone remember the maple lattes and macchiatos at Starbucks? Unfortunately that was before I fell in love w/ them so I never had a chance to have one. I did; however, decide to create my own version using this instead of espresso.

1 heaping tsp tea leaves
2oz just under boiling water
4oz milk
1tsp maple syrup- I use sugar free (does anyone else here feel that 1/4c is an outrageous serving size? I only added 2.92 calories to my latte w/ the amount I used)

Steep the tea in the water for 6min and decant creating a conTEAtrate, decant, and add the milk and maple syrup. Stir and reheat to desired temp. This can be made even more similarly to the old SBUX version by swapping the water for espresso. (I’m thinking a shot of espresso is an ounce, if that’s true, use equal parts espresso and water to make 2oz). You could also steep this directly into the water (and espresso if you use it) and milk mixture, but I don’t like milk residue on my leaves.

I don’t usually add milk to anything but masala chai, but this is very good! The maple sugar, milk, and black tea are all clearly evident. The black tea plays a more minor supporting role, but it is definitely enough to let you know, “Hey, this isn’t just a steamer!”. This would be wonderful, w/ pancakes, waffles, or french toast. Too bad this has caffeine in it, because I think kids would LOVE it. You could use a 2nd infusion of the tea, but I’m not sure how much you’d have to increase the steeping time by to get the flavor of the 1st infusion.

Not entirely sure on the steep time of this, as I was finishing making lunch at the time. Could have been 30 seconds in either direction.

That doesn’t really matter, though, because this tea tastes virtually the same no matter what I do to it, as long as it doesn’t wind up oversteeped by some ridiculous margin. The aroma of the dry leaves is still fantastic. I love the smell. I still prefer this Earl Grey to the one I tried earlier from Golden Moon, but I suspect that it’s the additional cream element that draws me and not so much anything else. This one has the sweetly aromatic fullness of an Earl Grey cream tea that I love, but the more tea I expose myself to the more I’m forced to come to terms with the fact that Tea Guys teas are always going to be somewhat limited by the quality of the tea leaf they’re using. It’s not of such quality that it could stand alone and compete with most other plain, unadorned teas I’ve been drinking, and no matter how decent the blend is, that’s always going to make a difference.

I can’t help but feel that I’m still searching for the perfect cup of Earl Grey. What I really need is a delicious black paired with the sweet, buttery richness of actual Madagascar vanilla and just enough bergamot to lighten the flavor of the brew. That is what I want. Someday, I will find it.

It’s still one of the most fragrantly pleasing teas in my cabinet. Or maybe that’s just my pre-existing bias; this is a holdover from the very earliest days of my digging into tea, generally, and for a long time it was my go-to morning tea.

I made a huge mistake when I made this tea. Not because it’s terrible but because I’ve been trying to reset my vampire-like schedule for days now. Yesterday, I finally managed to stay up all night and throughout the day, until 7pm or so, and then I went to sleep…only to wake up suddenly and completely at 1am and be unable to get back to sleep. Ugh. I was going to lie there and try to stick it out, but then I remembered that I bought a bunch of herbal and caffeine free tea samples from Tea Guys to try, since I’m not usually adventurous about fruity and flavored blends…and that I had some Peruvian leftovers in my fridge. That sort of decided me, so I figured that I would brew up one of them. In a state of half-consciousness I waffled and eventually chose this one. Ginger. Peach. It sounded sweet but kind of cozy.

Unfortunately…I did not read the little packet and realize that there was black tea in this. Of all of the blends I chose, I magically picked the one with caffeine in it and then poured four cups of hot water on top of two tablespoons of it, which is almost but not quite the whole sample. Ugh. I suppose today is round two of staying awake all day.

Fortunately, the tea isn’t bad. I mean…I’m going to be honest here…I really don’t have a lot of experiences with similar teas to compare it to. Yes, I’ve been drinking flavored tea (mostly iced, when it’s flavored) all of my life…I’m southern, we do that. (We also tend to add enough sugar to give a small country of people insulin issues, but regardless…) But that doesn’t mean I was paying attention to them beyond their ability to be consumed as a beverage during a meal!

That said, I had no trouble finding the peach or the ginger in this, so it seems to be basically just what was advertised. When it was very hot in the cup, the peach flavor came across a bit oddly. It reminded me of baby food…you know that nutty stewed smell from peaches in baby food? It was sort of like that. Not bad, but not ‘fresh peach’, not tangy…more mellow. The ginger is definitely a stronger flavor, but not overwhelming. Then again, I’m one of those people who buys chunks of crystallized ginger to snack on, so obviously it’s a flavor I’m pretty fond of. I even like the aftertaste of this tea; that’s where the ginger seems to come out most — what I now think of as an exhale-note, something I taste most when I exhale, clear my throat, or cough. Vanilla is like that for me, along with certain other sweeteners. What I really want to do is try this iced and see if the flavors are still as strong. This seems like it would be an outstanding summertime iced tea. I haven’t sweetened this at all, but I’m guessing it’d be delicious with honey particularly. There’s a part of me that wonders if it wouldn’t be particularly good over ice, sweetened, and with just a tiny bit of milk…as strange as that might sound.

I first set the rating for this tea somewhere down around 50, but I think I’m going to push it up a little bit closer to happy-face. I’d rate it higher save that I don’t really have any ratings for flavored blends, so I suppose some conservative caution is in order. Also, I need to stop rating things right on top of one another. The more tick-marks I add to this rating bar, the less easy it is to choose where a new one should go.

Of note…my sample says Ginger Peach, but the tea blend on the website says Ginger Darjeeling Peach. I assume it’s the same blend though. The ingredients look exactly the same.

I can clearly see all of the ingredients. I’t mainly smells like orange. I steeped it up. This tastes like a sweet orange with some roobios. While roobios is not one of my type of teas unless its subtle or overpowered by something. The roobios is in the taste but as strong as some blends. Still alittle to roobios to me though but I do enjoy the orange in here This is a decent.

Trying this one again. In the mood for a yunnan, and I’m all out of my Emperor’s Gold, which makes me sad.

I upped the leaf by a bit, decreased the steeping time, and it seems to have helped, but won’t turn this one into a re-order. It’s still watery underneath, and lacks the sweet-potato-honey sweetness that I associate with my favorite yunnans. That means the peppery taste is foremost, and while that wouldn’t be bad if the tea had depth, it lacks some depth, and the tea seems very shallow. With more leaf it’s a little bit more dynamic and definitely drinkable (easily so, as it isn’t very rich), but not by enough to make this a go-to yunnan for me. Bumping the rating accordingly.

Tea Guys. I know you guys. You’re all about your flavors and your blends, aren’t you? Why did I feel the need to order a straight bag of yunnan tea from you when there are other places that don’t make so many wacky blends that might have a better track record with tea that relies on nothing but its own leaves to succeed?

This tea seems to brew to a rich, dark reddish hue, which surprised me. It smelled exceptionally robust for a yunnan. I think I’ve gotten accustomed to yunnan jig and yunnan gold from Adagio, from my samplers. The latter even reminds me of their Fujian tea Golden Spring, which I drank no less than four cups of yesterday, and have grown really fond of.

This reminds me of no such thing. There’s a watery foundation that doesn’t seem to make sense beneath such a forceful scent and forward flavor, and as the tea has cooled there’s a bitter sharpness that emerges and leaves me with the impression of something faintly sour that lingers in the aftertaste. Against my better judgement, I’m going to toss out the remaining half of this cup and resteep, and see if that improves matters. I may have oversteeped by a minute on the first cup. What I really want, of course, is to tackle the rest of my samples and rinse this taste out of my mouth, but let’s give the tea the benefit of the doubt.

…

Okay, it’s better. It’s nothing to write home about, but better. I don’t know if the shorter steep time (on steep two? What the heck?) or second steeping overall were responsible, but at least it’s not SOUR. Maybe next time I’ll cut back the amount of tea in the first steep, too. I think this issue is 1/2 user error and 1/2 mediocre tea.

It’s not undrinkable, as a bottom line…it’s just nothing special. With milk, it’d wake me up. Then again? So would just about any black tea. I think I reserve the right to be more discriminating than that.

Edit: Last few sips of steep two had a nice, slightly smoky note worth mentioning.

Still pretty sure I wouldn’t order this again.

This tea is very sweet. You’ll expect that when you open it…you can smell the vanilla right away…and also a faint trace of something else that’s almost but not quite chocolate, even though chocolate isn’t represented anywhere in the actual flavor or scent once you brew it up.

It’s not ‘in your mouth’ sweet. Well…it IS, but the sweetness seems to linger after you swallow, in the aftertaste, rather than being picked up by your tongue when you actually have a sip of tea in your mouth. After taking another look at the ingredients I find myself unsurprised…it has honeybush and stevia leaf in it, and that seems pretty typical for both of those.

The ingredients list also includes kukicha. I confess that while I’ve had this tea multiple times in the past, I never bothered to look up what kukicha is. It seems to be bits of a green tea plant aside from the leaves? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kukicha

Learn something new every day.

It brews to a very pretty golden-honey color, with much warmer and deeper smells than I’m getting out of the foil bag. Trying to suss out the individual flavors is difficult for me tonight…I blame this cold I’m still fighting…but I can get a sense of every listed ingredient on the bag save for the coconut. There’s always a creeping sweetness at the finish, climbing up the sides of my tongue to linger toward the back. Every time I cough or clear my throat, it intensifies a lot. Crazy!

When I first tried this tea, I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. It is very sweet, and I was accustomed to a very mellow, completely unsweetened, almost sort of bread-y cup when I thought about chamomile teas. I think I’ve finally decided that I like it, though. It’s an off-beat kind of sweet, and the way it happens mostly on the swallow is interesting enough to keep my attention.

I did cut the amount it recommended to brew by 1/3 though…I used 2 tsp. in 3c. of water. I should probably try their recommendation sometime to see how it goes (maybe I’ll find the coconut on the other side of that threshold) but in the past I’ve never had any trouble infusing a plenty-strong cup with even less than I used tonight.

Now, to spend 20 minutes in the kitchen trying to get this stuff out of my infuser. I think I need to invest in some silk pyramid bags or something for a few of my pesky Particle Teas. :|

The cup of this that I am sipping right now is so good and so full of chocolate flavor that I would, if blindfolded, assume I was drinking hot chocolate. Not even exaggerating.

I went heavy on the blend since I’m nearing the end of the bag — 4 teaspoons in 1 cup of boiling water in a pot on the stove — and I threw in a small (read: very small — one ‘triangle’) piece of actual chocolate (Scharffen Berger 70% dark) once the water was hot enough, along with some turbinado sugar. I topped this with two cups of 2% milk and brought the whole mess back up to steaming-hot, then strained and poured. The result is phenomenal. I definitely like my hot chocolate…I’ve got gourmet and artisan tins of that on the shelf above my tea…but I don’t really care for how drowsy the sugar-bomb of it makes me. The fact that I was able to get pretty close to that kind of indulgence with this tea makes me pretty happy.

Also, on that note, I’m looking for dessert tea recommendations. It seems I’m more prone to getting a sweet tooth when the sky is grey and everything is cold, and since I live in Boston…well, you do the math. ;) Need some alternatives to actually pigging out on junk food!

Well, gosh. Now I’m stumped.

I came home expecting to give this tea its walking-papers. I enjoyed the morning mate so much, I felt sure there was no way this tea was going to compare. I go to the cupboard, open it up, pull out the basically fresh batch of this I’d reordered, sigh, open and sniff it…

…and decide that it still SMELLS good. …am I really getting rid of it? Maybe I’d better have some and make sure I want to do that…so I brew it up as a latte, intending to brew the other tea alongside in some grand conflagration of caffeine intake because clearly I need to compare the two. Only somewhere along the way I get distracted by how I’m enjoying THIS cup, and wouldn’t it be delicious-awesome as a treat if I threw in a tiny piece of Scharffen Berger milk chocolate bar to melt in it instead of sweetener? So I do, and it IS delicious-awesome.

At that point I realized I might need to re-evaluate my plans to ditch this tea. At some point I’ll do a side-by-side, it’s just a pain in the neck with lattes. Maybe tomorrow. For now…mmm. Tasty.

Steep time only reflects water portion of brewing.

So, I order from these guys periodically. They started here in the town I’m living in, after all (Boston) and I’m pretty sure their base of operations is still out of this state, so it’d be regional loyalty on my part if nothing else! Fortunately, some of their tea blends are so lovely that it’s hardly twisting my arm to browse their catalogue.

They really focus on flavored teas, as one glance at their catalogue can tell you. This is always tricky for me, because so many flavored blends (from any and all companies) try MUCH too hard.

I AM A STRAWBERRY TEA, it will scream at your nose where you stand, easily five feet away from the cannister. I KNOW THAT YOU WILL BE ABLE TO TASTE MY STRAWBERRIES ON YOUR UNCOMPLICATED AMERICAN PALATE!

Anyway, this is not a strawberry tea. This one is chocolate. Of note, I didn’t order this tea…they tossed it in with another of my orders (for the Earl Grey Cream, which I love) in a sample pack for free. The sample isn’t a bad size, either…good for a few cups at 9g, and this is hardly the first sample they’ve sent me.

I don’t often feel the burning desire to consume chocolate, but every now and then I want some. The fact that I’ve had this opened (I must have tried a cup before? I don’t remember doing so) in my cupboard for months is testament to that fact, and perhaps worth remembering in my review…I rolled the top of the foil but didn’t seal it.

The blurb up top is different from the blurb on the back of my sample…it says ‘cocoa beans, vanilla, barley and yogurt bits’, just as a heads-up.

Either way, I’m finding I really like it. I wanted something other than chai today (expected the world to end, there) but needed the caffeine and some kind of perk to my mood. Usually for my chocolate fix I go straight to the hard stuff — Dagoba’s organic Xocolatl hot cocoa with spicy chili and cinnamon, yum yum yum — but I’m clean out of the stuff, and I spotted this while I was rummaging around unsatisfied through my other options…so I decided to give it a go.

The smell of the tea is fantastic, if you like the smell of nutty cocoa. They recommend preparing it as a latte, which is what I did. I simmered approximately 3 teaspoons of it in a cup of water as per the recommendation on the packet, but instead of adding 1/2 cup (1%) milk when that was done with, I added the full cup to stretch it a little, and heated it again. The smell while it was simmering in the water was very tea-strong, probably unsurprisingly. Once I added the milk, though, it smelled lightly like baking, tea-infused chocolate-chip cookies. That sounds almost gross to me to write, but was actually sort of nice. A little bit of german rock sugar finished it off. In the end, it wasn’t quite as dark as a chai, but still had that pretty caramel-like color.

The actual latte is pretty nice. It differs yet again from its smell by being more tea-flavored on the tongue than the smell suggests it’s going to be, but the taste of the chocolate is easily detectable. It reminds me a little bit of those chocolate-striped cookies that usually have chocolate all on the bottom…but without that much sweetness, with a little bit of nuttiness, and with a definite black tea base.

I could see myself ordering this as a way to scratch the occasional sweet-tooth itch I get, for certain, though as I say chocolate isn’t usually what tickles my fancy, so the rest of the time it’d be likely to stay on the shelf.

Very tasty. I really enjoy the earl grey with a strong bergamot citrus flavor. I also tasted a mild smooth vanilla flavored finish.

Inhaled the sweet aroma of almonds, coconut, and walnut before steeping. This was exactly what I was looking for in a dessert green tea. I mainly tasted almond/nuttiness and coconut (with a hint of caramel) but was glad it didn’t overwhelm the green tea; it complements it.